Life Odyssey of the Soul

Simon Grabowski

(summary for pages 394-405)

The author initially reviews his way into Fantastic Literature.
Eigil Nyborg's The Inner Line in the Tales of H. C.
Andersen (Den indre linie i H. C. Andersens eventyr,
1962) introduced him to a Jungian approach to Andersen as well as to
some of C. G. Jung's basic work itself. During his first years of
subsequent academic literary studies, three further challenges -
Gulliver's Travels by Swift, Mysteries by Hamsun,
and his encounter with the writings of German romanticism - combined to
form a supreme challenge, the re-union with Andersen on a new level of
insight. Thus, out of a specific Jungian approach, the comprehensive
Fantastic Literature approach developed in time.

But this approach, then, immediately offers itself as a tool
for seeing Andersen the story-teller in a perspective vastly broader
than the worn-out international cliché notion of him as a
children's author. In addition, even in one of his very first
adoptions, within the folk tale genre, of the specific genre of the
magic tale, "The Tinder Box" ("Fyrtøiet",
1835), a specific detail points even beyond the overall genre of
Fantastic Literature and into the realm of the epic life saga. Through
his sudden ownership of the tinder box, left underground long ago by
the witch's grandmother, the soldier also, paradoxically, assumes
patriarchal responsibility for re-installing to power an elemental,
primordial force of a sunken matriarchy, for the conceivable purpose of
reconciling, in time and within the evolution of human society, these
two warring opposites. Carrying out such a large-scale task would
require a lifetime, and we are free to imagine the brief story
subsequently carried on into a sweepingly panoramic saga of the life of
the hero who did it. Such a tale would comprise all of the
protagonist's adult development, instead of just the introductory
round of personality integration rendered symbolically - in accordance
with the Jungian view - by the traditional magic tale.

Narratives combining, panoramically, both these stages
- the "magic" outset and the "epic" continuation -
and thus rendering, so to speak, the entire self-realization saga of
the "seven-league soul", seem rare in literature; and in
Andersen's own work, too, we only meet the 'magic' and the
'panoramic' in separate tales. As with a number of works by
other famous authors - Swift, Carroll, Stevenson, Dumas -
Andersen's magic tales have fallen from adult reading into
children's literature, where young readers have reaped intuitive
insight from the magic elements inaccessible to modern adult reading
audiences not yet in possession of tools for conscious,
psychoanalytical discovery. In recent decades, the Swedish concept of
"allålderslitteratur" has resurrected the magic genre
of Fantastic Literature as a genre offering itself, fundamentally and
specifically, to readers of all ages.

But Andersen's panoramic stories, too, belong naturally
within the liberal bounds of such an "all-ages" literature.
Having lost touch, to such a devastating degree, in our own times with
the archetype of "life totality", we need to be reminded that
life is, above all, man's entire odyssey through his own emerging
life experience, and not just some blindfolded and disconnected
piecemeal affair. In the story of "The Bell" (1845), the two
protagonists are fundamentally inspired with the vision of carrying
through their individual life odyssey to its farthest goal - the
reunion, even, with the divine entity from which they have emerged into
earthly life. To the little boy in "The Comet" (1869), the
far-reaching symbols of evolving life entity inherent in the soap
bubbles and in the comet itself call the archetype of life totality
into a presence within his young mind from an exceptionally early stage
- and, looking back as an old man, over his completed life, he
experiences - on the very eve of the return of the comet! - the actual
fulfilment, the desire of which had unconsciously spurred him on.

In some of his panoramic stories, such as for example "The
Angel" (1844), and "The Child in the Grave" (1859),
Andersen even extends his life panorama across the boundaries
of earthly life. In "Peiter, Peter, and Peer" (1868), the
phenomenon of the shooting star is "explained" to the reader
as the signal of a soul's entrance from the beyond into earthly
life, or as its departure back from it. In the latter story, we
witness, one by one, three little brothers' individual realization
of his own purpose in life; three unspectacular, but no less personally
distinct, life destinies. Even these, then, are to be viewed as the
fulfilment of the task for which the soul descended into its human
existence.

Life seen as a journey of the soul, travelling along the road
of its life adventure - this vision of life is an archetypal one, and
in the mind of the present writer, it broke into final verbalization
almost two years prior to the writing of this essay. Throughout his
reading life, the vision has gradually condensed out of a certain
spiritual essence found by the author to constitute a most special
common ground in the respective writings of Hans Christian Andersen and
Alexandre Dumas; to them both, our life story on earth is not in any
way separate from the unlimited Beyond of the Soul. While in Andersen
this becomes most clear in quite a number of his panoramic stories, one
has to resort, for an equally tangible confirmation of it in Dumas, to
the memoirs of the latter. Using the very same vision of life in its
eternal context as a key to Knut Hamsun's Mysteries
(1892), one also finds oneself startlingly equipped to crystallize the
entire jungle of enigma of this strange novel into an amazing focal
point of sudden, all-pervading meaning.

In the author's view, the tragedy of Hamsun's life
transpired out of a personal lack of contact with this vision in his
own life, while its existential presence in the self-understanding of
both Dumas and Andersen was strong. As for broadcasting this vision to
their respective readers, Andersen's way is almost propagandist,
while Dumas' is discrete. One has to cover the major span of the
musketeer saga, from the death of Mme. Bonacieux, towards the end of
The Three Musketeers (1844), until the death of
d'Artagnan, on the final page of Vicomte de Bragelonne
(1848-50), to have fully fathomed the unspoken presence of an
invisible, eternal realm of the soul behind the immediate scene of its
earthly life drama. The musketeer saga appears to be one of the few
narratives within Western literature which starts out in the realm of
the magic tale and develops into a full-fledged epic life saga. The
introductory novel cannot end the story, because its hero soldier -
unlike the soldier in "The Tinder Box" - cannot really accept
the necessary destruction of the witch, thus enabling her, in time, to
destroy his one and only true princess. The restoration of this severe
damage to the feminine principle within d'Artagnan himself becomes
the underground fuel for the rest of the trilogy. Building their
magnificent life panoramas in so masterly a fashion into an omnipresent
and eternal spiritual context, the author considers that Andersen and
Dumas were in fact reaching into a prophetic realm of writing -
enabling, in an age of recklessly devastating materialism, a basically
religious view of life to hibernate within the safe domain of art:
preserving it thus towards future epochs of science in which an
all-encompassing cosmic insight into the unity of the material and the
spiritual will finally catapult our evolution on earth into a
universally redeeming new stage of civilization.